Over the years I’ve read dozens (if not hundreds) of papers on education learning on topics such as cognitive processes, creativity, and critical thinking. Readers of this blog know that I’m a proponent of Cognitive Load Theory. I find it a useful framework, and it seems to explain a number of puzzles in pedagogy about why some things seem to work and why other things don’t. Context matters in all these cases!
Today’s post highlights a summary article (available here), that’s relatively short and easy to read, by John Sweller, one of the “founders” of Cognitive Load Theory. It is titled Some Critical Thoughts about Critical Thinking and Creativity. In this article, Sweller highlights the analogy between evolution by natural selection (the creativity of nature!) and human cognitive architecture (which may have something to say about the creativity of humans). Both can be considered as Natural Information Processing Systems. There’s a nifty table highlighting the analogy.
Sweller also defines and distinguishes biologically primary versus biologically secondary knowledge. The former is acquired unconsciously for the most part, and can be quite complex. Examples include learning to understand and speak one’s native language, negotiating basic social interactions, and using means-end analysis to solve a problem. The latter must be acquired consciously – you have to do some work to learn the stuff! Examples include learning to read and write, push symbols in math, and most things you learn in school classrooms.
Where does the teaching and learning of “critical thinking” and “creativity”, popular topics in education, come into play? The crux of the article is that there is little evidence for teaching very-generalized strategies to help students think more creatively or critically. The key ingredient that presupposes those desired abilities is to have domain knowledge in the area. The more, the better, and the easier it is to think critically.
Think about a hobby you have. You might have read a lot about it, spent lots of time thinking about it, went out of your way to learn as much about it as you can, talked to people about it, and even had arguments with others where you’ve been able to hold your own because you actually knew something about the topic at hand. You can think critically and creatively around it. You may have learned it all “on your own” but if you think about it, your knowledge is owed to other experts who wrote things you’ve read or provided useful information you didn’t know when you were just starting out.
Humans have evolved to be efficient at providing information to each other socially (even mediated through the pages of the book or the internet). That’s what (hopefully) happens in classrooms. Teachers tell you things you would otherwise have trouble grasping on your own. We do this by pre-digesting the material and thinking about how to facilitate your learning it in bite-sized pieces so your working memory can handle it and then transfer it to long-term memory (your information store). The hope is that you can then apply it to related situations that provides feedback for you to learn it better! That’s what homework, quizzes, and tests are for! Evolution does something very similar, as you can see from the table, except in education we skip the inefficient first step of random generate-and-test. That’s only for completely novel situations where you have no background knowledge and you’re forced to come up with something.
While there is continual hoopla about teaching “critical thinking” or “creativity”, these are often vaguely defined. Sweller cuts to the chase that you mostly don’t have to worry about that part if you teach students how to acquire and use information in a particular domain. Providing examples is a great way of doing that – it’s a particularly efficient way to transmit domain knowledge and skills. Requiring students to practice what you want them to learn is another well-honed educational pedagogy. It’s not new and fancy. We’ve been doing it for a long time.
The information in the article wasn’t new to me, but if you’re intrigued (or you disagree) with some of what I’ve said above, I suggest reading the full article because I’ve glossed over many things I’ve learned in this area from my reasonably extensive reading. That being said, three things that jumped out at me from reading this were:
· I should consider asking students to specifically tell me one hobby or area of expertise they have. (Some of them tell me this as part of their “intro” but sometimes they tell me other factoids instead.) Not only will I get to learn a bit more about them, but I can use this as a springboard for a discussion about learning chemistry.
· It made me notice that for some particularly challenging concepts in chemistry, students think they know something but only in a rather vague way – and when I ask follow-up questions in office hours, the missing links are often content/knowledge they don’t remember or didn’t know well to begin with.
· As I get older and I expect to experience some cognitive impairment decline (seeing what’s happening to older relatives), it’s made me think about ways I can trigger long-term memory. I sometimes do this when talking to an older relative by picking a topic they have expertise in to facilitate conversation, but I’m starting to muse about how I can do this for myself as I will at some point (probably) face a similar decline.
In the meantime, I’m still a voracious reader and trying to learn as much as I can about so many interesting things! I hope I’m moving some of this into long-term memory, although I’m starting to see occasional hiccups in retrieving that information. I hope I will continue to be able to think critically and creatively for as long as I can! But human cognitive architecture also has its limits. And mortality is our gift. Why, I cannot say.
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